snow lizard
Dedicated Slacker
maxman65 said:I'm afraid I dont really know what balanced /unbalanced means.
If an electrical audio signal has to travel through a long cable run - for example you plug your microphone into a snake or something and it goes around 100 feet out to the console - the cable can act as an antenna to capture stray noise from various sources. An unbalanced line will have the signal conductor or "hot" wire and a ground. To balance the signal it needs to be duplicated to transmit through a second conductor, and the polarity of one of the signal wires is flipped out of phase. An XLR cable or other balanced line has the 2 signal wires twisted together with the ground going through a shield. So now you have the "hot" wire or "+" signal twisted around another conductor carrying the "cold" or "-" signal. If you were to sum the two signals together as they are in the cable they would phase cancel each other and all you would have is any noise picked up through the long cable run. When the signal reaches its destination (eg. mic preamp) it gets converted back to unbalanced. So the polarity of the cold signal gets flipped back to hot which puts the noise inducted through the cable run out of phase to the signal, therefore cancelled.
If you're not doing a long cable run you don't really need balanced lines. Most microphones have balanced output by default. An XLR to 1/4" TS cable is not balanced. That can cause things like a slight drop in signal level or the inability to use phantom power.